Google Rolled Out Panda 4.0 Update

On May 20, 2014, head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm. Panda algorithm is designed to prevent sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results.

Google is frequently updating us on Panda refreshes and updates. However, Panda 4.0 is a bigger update. It must be a major update to the actual algorithm when compared to a data refresh because Google has made changes to how Panda identifies sites and has released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm.

Google says Search Engine Land, “Panda 4.0 update will be gentler for some sites, and lay the groundwork for future changes in that direction. Panda 4.0 affects different languages to different degrees. In English for example, the impact is ~7.5% of queries that are affected to a degree that a regular user might notice.”

The following chart explains the big changes of this update. Algoroo is reporting slightly reached more than average changes for yesterday and also MozCast has reported immense variations in search results this week.